My main enigma is my personal site, which was originally at bibliogirl.net. One error I made there was that I forgot the e-mail account I had tied to that domain also disappeared, and my main YouTube account was tied to it, so now I can’t login to the account. Yet, I don’t know how you change the e-mail address your YouTube account is tied to. I can’t change it to my primary e-mail because I think one of my previously suspended accounts was tied to that e-mail. I guess I must have some kind of Google dashboard that I can change it at. But I was able to get into that account before yesterday, so maybe it was just a glitch.
Anyway, my personal site/domain hub is on the back burner right now, as I don’t know what to do with it. I imagine if I go through with my web design certificate and complete it, I’ll want to have a portfolio site of sorts. I imagine I’ll be doing that in the Portfolio Development class I have to take for the certificate. (I just realized I don’t have my work from last semester, because I lost all my old college work when I was forced to format my flash drive. Shoot! But I might have the final stuff for my e-commerce class still in my author site folder, and the MAT 135 Ning might still have my graphic design stuff, but I doubt it). But the idea I initially had for bibliogirl.net was of a personal rather than a professional nature. I just can’t figure out how to go about it. I thought about doing a site offering translation or transcription services, since I have experience in both though I’m not licensed or certified in either. Again, though, that seems more business than personal. I may have to do some research. I’ll look at the personal site case study too in the Building Web Sites for Dummies: An All-in-One Desk Reference book I got from the library a couple days ago.
So my main sites right now are my writing site and Myu Corner. My writing site’s fine, though it needs some updating, and I need to do something about the Javascript I put in so that I could avoid having to manually change the “updated on” date on every single page every time I updated the site (I have to do this because every page has the same basic layout coding; only the content is different), since it updates every time someone refreshes the page, which is not what I want. I also realized I need to make the most recent documents I put up on Scribd excerpts like the others.
Myu Corner hasn’t been updated since the end of October. Since I got busy with school and was constantly being late with the Song of the Week feature, I decided I needed a break. I also need to reevaluate the mission of the site in light of the feedback I got from the Miss Dream forum. Do I want it to continue to be a comprehensive information site, or do I want to zero in on something, like the omake segments or character info? At any rate, I’ll have to change up the navigation situation so it is less confusing. I like having the navigation on the top, but maybe I can make more of a banner with navigation integrated into it. As for displaying updates, I need to figure out how to do that. Maybe I’ll need a Content Management System, as I said before. I could do them by hand, but I tried that and it didn’t look good.
As for other sites – ones I haven’t made yet – there are a few of these. One is Sparkle Moon, a site about PGSM (the Sailor Moon live-action series) and the sister site of Myu Corner. I have the content all planned out and even have most of the character profiles written already. I just need to actually make the site. I am unsure of what sort of layout it will have at this point. I do know for sure that it will be information-centric and that I am going to try to start some sort of community around it if I can garner enough interest in it. The main draw of the site is going to be transcripts, but there will also be a “creative” section for creative things inspired by the series, such as recipes (which Elly-san has graciously offered to provide for me; I will make this open to others as well). If I can figure out how to do the sort of table-esque side navigation that Kirari-PGSM and Serebii.net have, that would be good. I think when I peeked at the code for Kirari-PGSM it was pretty basic.
I have had troubles making fanlistings thanks to Enthusiast, the PHP fanlisting management code that EVERYONE uses for their fanlistings nowadays. But I definitely intend to go ahead with my Pokémon Ranger series fanlisting, which I can do now that three games have been released (a game series has to have had three or more games released for you to have a “series” fanlisting, according to The Fanlistings Network’s rules). It will have basic info about the games, as well a walkthrough for each of the games. I considered resurrecting one of my old fanlistings Memory of Time, a fanlisting for the anime series Fancy Lala, but now I’m thinking I won’t.
Other than this, I’ve planned to resurrect two of my old character shrines: Liquid Mercury (which was, among other things, my first and only Geocities site), my Sailor Mercury shrine, and Ayeka’s Palace, my old shrine to Ayeka from Tenchi Muyo. I’ve started remaking Liquid Mercury using a very nice premade layout from Manga Angels. Generally, I like to have as much control over the layout as possible, doing all the coding and such. But since the site is primarily content-centric, I decided to go for using a premade layout. I got anxious about it though, to be honest. But now, I realize it’s something worth trying. If I don’t like it, I can change it once I know more about doing layouts. As for the content, I have a lot more content available to me than I did back around 2000 when I first created Liquid Mercury, now that I know about the musicals and the live-action series. But I am going all-out as far as video clips go, even including video game clips (if Maraviollantes of Sailorvgame.org, the ultimate site on the Sailor Moon video games and the source of pretty much all my clips and video game book scans, will let me do so).
Ayeka’s Palace I need to decide on a direction on. Fortunately, there is only one other Ayeka shrine on the web – The Ayeka Fan Club – and they haven’t updated since 2007. I suppose I could go for a similar info/media focus like Liquid Mercury. Or I could do something different. I did consider a sort of blog-in-character approach, where I post blogs pretending to be Ayeka. I guess I should watch more of the series before I decide; I really haven’t seen as much of Tenchi as I have of Sailor Moon.
I'd also like to do a general anime and manga guides site, a sort of way of fulfilling my long-held desire to create a site encompassing my whole anime and manga interest. (Makes me think of Freud - was it Freud? - and how he said literature is a wish-fulfillment). I'm thinking this will consist of basic guides and info, as well as maybe a section for parents with something akin to Screen It!, that site that has guides to movies for parents to look at and see what their kids are really watching. Probably I'd build it with Wordpress or something to make building a community easier. I considered a wiki, but I'm too baffled by the wiki-making process to even try.
I’d also like to go forward with my two stories about magic that aren’t specifically Christian-based. I know, sounds awful, doesn’t it? Heresy! But I got inspired to write two stories – one a sort of “otaku senshi” series about a group of music-based magical girls from a long-ago kingdom in the constellation Lyra, and the other a series called “Enchanted Supermarket” that is meant to be part memoir in that the stories will mostly be based off my real experiences working at a supermarket but will feature a supermarket run by a group of people who come from a magical land (tentatively called “The Archlands”) and run the store as a cover so they can investigate the activities of this evil prince who’s trying to destroy them. The main character’s name is Alice (who, I admit, I probably named after Alice Cullen, Edward Cullen’s precognitive “sister,” since I came up with the character names for this series right after reading the first Twilight book…which reminds me, I finally was able to get my hands on a copy of New Moon, which has been checked out of every public library in the county system since the summer. I had a librarian request it for me, and lo and behold they were able to get it). She has powers over both wind and time, and her power object is this “windglass,” kinda like an hourglass, that she wears around her neck. (I guess it would kind of look like the Time Turner prop from the 3rd Harry Potter film). Kinda like the kid from Sky High (great movie btw), her parents are the strongest magical people in The Archlands, the Windsinger and the Timeweaver. Unfortunately, the evil prince has them locked up in his dungeon. I haven’t developed it much more than that because I’ve been focused on my novel and, more lately, on the music-based senshi series. I will probably base the characters on some of my coworkers, and as I said, most of the stories will be inspired by real events.
Anyway, I may make mini-sites to feature these two stories. I had envisioned “Enchanted Supermarket” as a webcomic, but again the lack of artistic skill on my part is a snag in that regard. The other story, called “Music Land Maestress,” I already have plans to make a site for. I even started doing profiles for the senshi characters, using the templates from a great site called Create Your Own Otaku Senshi, which walks you through all the steps needed to complete the templates, along with a lot of other useful things.
So I have a lot of sites planned, and doing them could take a lot of work. I would like to try to pick up where I left off with my web design certificate next spring (a lack of money prevented me from taking classes this semester, and it’s just as well), if I can take it. If I can do that, and if I take a class or two in the summer, hopefully I can have it finished within a year of getting my B.A. That would be good. I could hang onto my current job for another year, I think. I'm going to try to do some self-education over winter break as well, using the two other books I found at the library -- Hands-On Design: CSS Web Site Design and HTML Dog: The Best-Practice Guide to XHTML & CSS -- both books intended for CSS newbies like myself.
Okay, I’m kinda tired, and I’ve been writing out this post in Word intermittently for two days, so I’m going to end here. Good night!
No comments:
Post a Comment